Network rendering - per core licensing in the age of many-core CPUs

[DriesV]

Intel just released their new dual socket Xeon CPUs. The flagship is the E5-2699 V3 with 18 cores.
Two of these monsters in a workstation gets you 36 cores or 72 threads.

If you have such machine and wish to use all of its cores for network rendering, you'll need a 96-core license. This comes down to an annual cost of €1180, just to able to leverage all cores of a single (albeit extremely powerful!) render node.

Open question:
How much longer will Luxion be able to sustain per core licensing for network rendering?
Most other renderes seem to license per node. Next year Intel will be releasing 72-core CPUs.

Not a rant, just an observation based on current developments... I'm interested in your views...

Dries

[cadjockey]

I'm interested in this also. The existing model is flawed IMHO

[Chad Holton]

Wow! Been curious what the future holds for these. I think it's almost time for a new computer. My current machine (i7) is showing some age.

[edwardo]

shhhh, don't say that, i just got an i7 4 core, and very happy! But if my next machine is likely to be a 72 core beast I can't be 'paying by the core' for software

oooh, imagine 144 threads